20 Facts, 11 Strokes
by oncewas
Summary: Moving through Hyuuga Neji's life in twenty short paragraphs. Featuring calligraphy and obscure bird imagery.


**Title: **20 Facts, 11 Strokes  
**Series: **_Naruto_**  
Disclaimer: **_Naruto _and its characters do not belong to me. **  
Rating: **PG  
**Warning:** None. **  
Length: **944 words.  
**Author Note: **Originally written as an "exercise" for a LiveJournal community called 20 truths; this is meant to detail twenty "facts" about Hyuuga Neji's life. There is reference to different styles of Japanese calligraphy within, as well as certain kanji characters. The story will be far more worthwhile if you understand them. Links to helpful sites are included in my profile; don't comment about not understanding what's going on unless you went there first.

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1)Hyuuga Neji doesn't remember his mother. As far as he's concerned, she never existed and it's just as well; later on, she'll be spared the pain of her husband's death and the bitter flower that blooms and dies beneath her son's breast. As far as he's concerned, she died as close to happy as she could have.

2) Neji _does_ remember his father. Before his father teaches him the art (never called a martial one) of Jyuuken, before the faint gasps of Byakugan awaken in his retina, Neji learns calligraphy. Neji's favorite, at first, is "bird:" eleven strokes that he can lengthen and let fly. The fifth, sixth, and seventh strokes defy the one-hundred-eighty degree logic of the lines and the little pictogram tries to soar from the soaked tip of his sumi brush. Hizashi has practiced kaisho, but it's easy enough to see from the long sweeps and graceful arcs that his son will practice sousho.

3) When his Uncle, flanked by the Hyuuga Council elders, marks his forehead with the dreaded manji, his favorite becomes "freedom." Both of the two figures look like boxes, like cages, but his Father quickly points out that the first one is open.

4) After Hizashi walks to his death, some of Neji's cousins remark that he's forgotten his beautiful calligraphy , that he's forsaking what his Father has taught him when Neji ritually burns the rolled wallscrolls, stiff with age and caked ink. Neji consistently ignores them. If any of his so-called relatives deigned to watch him train, they'd recognize the flowing movements, the sharp angles, and awkward constructions instantly.

5) Neji feels the shadow of guilt and hot burn of sick-satisfaction simultaneously, for the first time, when he nearly sends his cousin Hinata to an early grave. He thinks that maybe blood will be the ink with which he writes from now on.

6) After Neji fights Naruto, he realizes that there's something wrong with his form. The purity of sousho and its sweeping fundamentals has devolved into kaisho, and that's not getting him anywhere. His Uncle watches in the stands and finds himself staring at a kunai buried six years in the past.

7) Neji adjusts, and before long he's killed a man and nearly died trying.

8) His body becomes the brush; he trains for hours with anyone he can, his team, his teacher, his Uncle even, and makes jounin before any of his genin counterparts. Neji attempts to eliminate the stroke order, work everything in a tight, fine-spun circle.

9) Lee dubs him "changed." Tenten throws her knives and turns one eye away. Neji doesn't understand why she can't quite look him in the eye. He activates his byakugan and tells her as much.

10) Tenten cites the swirling ANBU tattoo on his left tricep.

11) Now everyone watches, acknowledges that Jyuuken is a living, beautiful thing. The village civilians see him train in the morning, practicing katas in a grove of trees by his Clan's home and think: _he dances_. The village shinobi see him train in the afternoon, practicing evasion and detection in the weapons' fields and think: _he is untouchable_. His enemies see his mask and his divinity in the evening on the battlefield and think: **six** strokes total, **four** stroke radical--_I die_.

12) Neji thus approves of the ANBU ninjato and incorporates it into his grand design.

13) On a mission in Grass, sometime after his eighteenth birthday, he decides to embrace the symbol that's brought him thus far and unbinds the gauze around his forehead. When the Falcon mask comes off, the manji stands as a livid reminder of the kaisho his Father could not escape.

14) That same mission, Neji is forced to kill a family of four who inadvertently trip the elaborate weave of traps his team has set (he draws their explosive tags with the flash ink, power packed with the most efficient, arcing strokes possible). 

15) At the team's safehouse, Neji starts the mission report and finds himself inking the complicated dual-kanji for "innocence" (_junketsu, junketsu_) over and over again. ANBU Wolf offers him a drink, and for the first time, he accepts.

16) The next morning, as dawn breaks and the team makes preparations to depart, Neji finds himself in bed with their veteran captain, Uzuki Yuugao. She has been the first, and he wonders (carefully folding the report he couldn't finish, slipping it into his flak vest) if she'll be the last.

17) On the eve of his twentieth birthday, Hinata has her first son and he watches his Uncle draw the manji on Hanabi's forehead. There is nothing graceful about it, but it doesn't need to be. Neji understands that Hiashi wants the stability and the predictable design. With vague sympathy, he touches his own forehead.

18) Neji withdraws from ANBU, finally, after eight blood-soaked years. He is twenty-three years old and it is at his Uncle's request. He fingers the mask, strangely, and remembers painting the dark red stripes of paint on it.

19) When Neji isn't training, speaking with his old teammates or haunting the assignment desk, he spends countless hours in his room, meditating (perhaps; his relatives cannot be sure). When Hiashi walks in one evening, looking for the now-infamous Hyuuga Prodigy, he is simultaneously shocked and appalled that his walls are covered in elegant, scrolling calligraphy. Written in tell-tale dark red.

20) Years later, Yuugao casually informs him that nothing had happened. That time. In Grass. Neji nods accordingly (not even the first) and dips into the first set of his katas. He tells her, _let me show you the bird_. Eleven strokes. He flies.


End file.
